of the order, run a very great risk of growing old under the trowel
without ever realizing their purpose. Yet there is a secret, but it is so
inviolable that it has never been confided or whispered to anyone. Those
who stop at the outward crust of things imagine that the secret consists
in words, in signs, or that the main point of it is to be found only in
reaching the highest degree. This is a mistaken view: the man who guesses
the secret of Freemasonry, and to know it you must guess it, reaches that
point only through long attendance in the lodges, through deep thinking,
comparison, and deduction. He would not trust that secret to his best
friend in Freemasonry, because he is aware that if his friend has not
found it out, he could not make any use of it after it had been whispered
in his ear. No, he keeps his peace, and the secret remains a secret.

Everything done in a lodge must be secret; but those who have
unscrupulously revealed what is done in the lodge, have been unable to
reveal that which is essential; they had no knowledge of it, and had they
known it, they certainly would not have unveiled the mystery of the
ceremonies.

The impression felt in our days by the non-initiated is of the same
nature as that felt in former times by those who were not initiated in
the mysteries enacted at Eleusis in honour of Ceres. But the mysteries of
Eleusis interested the whole of Greece, and whoever had attained some
eminence in the society of those days had an ardent wish to take a part
in those mysterious ceremonies, while Freemasonry, in the midst of many
men of the highest merit, reckons a crowd of scoundrels whom no society
ought to acknowledge, because they are the refuse of mankind as far as
morality is concerned.

In the mysteries of Ceres, an inscrutable silence was long kept, owing to